And thus a person’s political pretensions come crashing down, his/her 
nebulous good intentions broken into shards and scattered, Ozymandias-like, 
across the shifting sands by the piercing, finely-nuanced moral didacticism 
of a critical realist:

“I either protest against and boycott them all, or none of them, or I'm a 
hypocrite.”

Where once I had thought that I could cloak myself (pun intended) in 
perceptual relativism a la Larry Berg because of my arrogance and infinite 
capacity for self-delusion, alas and eheu I am dragged by the thin clothing 
of my illusions into the harsh, ascetic light of reality, under the stern 
and penetrating gaze of a ‘real’ critical geographer!

It’s really quite difficult to address this glib, Tebbitesque 
(we-might-as-well-sell-manacles 
-to-the-apartheid-regime-because-someone-will-and-it-might-as-well-be-us-making-the-profit) 
act of self-justification without getting quite angry, particularly in view 
of the principal assertion which is that political action of any kind is 
useless unless it’s conducted by everyone and focused everywhere all at 
once, which is just the usual excuse for doing nothing. So I’m not going to 
pretend not to be insulted and restrict myself instead to addressing some of 
the more facile assertions and provide some examples of exactly why this 
kind of cynicism is degrading, erosive and has for a guiding constant not 
logic or pragmatism, but instead only an unceasingly smug, white, 
self-interested lethargy.

Working for a university with defence contracts – Now, I could be indulging 
in a little moral ambivalence here (doubtless those of you who know better 
will write in and criticise me) but firstly there is no necessary 
contradiction between being OK about the legitimate defence requirements of 
one’s country (which I am, although with qualifications about who does the 
defining of legitimacy), and working on vague, nebulous ‘defence industry’ 
projects/contracts, which are very rarely about ‘defence’ (rarely was a word 
so misused than in this context) and more frequently about selling any 
offensive weapon to anyone anywhere, habitually to be used on unarmed 
civilian populations. A broad attempt to conflate anything at all that has 
to do with the UK military with what Elsevier Reed and the DESi does and to 
paint them all with the same brush, therefore ignores for instance the 
choices (that word again) made by a small but significant number of 
activsts/academics who do precisely that – protest at any and all 
involvement of universities with any kind of arms industry. And beyond them 
the non-academics who do the same, etc. etc.

Pensions invested in defense companies – I’m not sure what the (various?) UK 
university pension schemes have their money invested in but then that also 
is a personal choice, isn’t it? If you have to have a pension at all (itself 
a dubious proposition in the UK these days) then there are these things 
called ‘ethical investments’, where you get to choose in what and how to 
invest your money – you are responsible for the way you live your life in 
every aspect of it and you may choose to act first and most strongly on 
those things which to you are the most important or you may choose to act on 
all of them, but you are *not* a hypocrite because you make those choices. 
Some folk choose not to invest savings or pensions in Big Pharma because 
that’s their own personal ‘selective target’, whereas some choose 
Agribusiness and GM crops, and others choose weapons and some people choose 
all of these, just as some people choose to support charities and causes 
that are close to them and not *all* charities and causes – just because 
someone doesn’t tick d) all of the above and opt out of the capitalist 
system completely, doesn’t make them a hypocrite; rather (at least to me) it 
makes them more worthy just because of the constant sneering and carping by 
those who do nothing, whose purpose is not to point out any real failings in 
activism but to cover up the guilt they feel about doing nothing.

Flying on Boeings and taking grants from state agencies such as ESRC. This 
goes along with the same desperately thin school of reason as ‘we’re all 
guilty because we all use combustion engines in our cars and as we all know, 
the engines of tanks and fighter planes use variations of internal 
combustion’, or ‘we’re all the same because we all breathe oxygen and are 
complicit because we have breathed the same oxygen as the armed services.’ 
Or even ‘because we were wretched enough to demand armed forces to defend 
our country then we are just as complicit because… well…. Look at what they 
get up to!’ As to being complicit because we share classes with members of 
the armed forces, words fail me; being someone who himself spent an (albeit 
brief) period in the armed forces why do you think I would object to 
learning with military personnel? One of the strongest arguments for 
attacking the ‘defence industry’ is that the wars such personnel frequently 
find themselves in (e.g. Iraq) have no more logic than satisfying the 
predatory commercial lusts of such industries, which prostitute an entirely 
laudable loyalty to country for a simple desire to make massive profits out 
of the suffering of military and civilian alike. Not to mention that the 
more military personnel there are in the classroom, the less there are out 
there killing and being killed

“Boycotting Elsevier is very easy to do if you have no vested interest, but 
it isolates one company in a nice and easy way and misses the complexity of 
the relationship between academia and the military” – A fairly shameful 
piece of orotundity. Evades the point and also sets up a vague and 
artificially constructed binary (academia/military), whilst at the same time 
denying agency and interplay to the activist/corporate dynamic (“isolates 
one company”) and puts the burden of inactivity on the activist (“nice and 
easy way”) through the use of vague adjectival persiflage….. Suffice it to 
say that if you aren't long into your academic career (like me) boycotting 
ER is not that easy, and being involved in a campaign like this is not an 
easy choice these days; it seems at least possible that being involved won't 
make you top-of-the-pops with your department, university or future 
employers, which gives you a very big vested interest. Whereas if you were 
(just for the sake of argument) a tenured professor, you have power and 
status in the hierarchy and a considerably greater degree of hegemonic 
leverage… if you could be bothered.

The IEHG is a truly international project which reaches out to and gives 
voice to non-Anglo-American scholars, underlain by critical approaches. 
Well, if this is the case, should it not attempt to encompass, critique and 
act on the more direct concerns of some of those countries that it claims to 
be giving a voice to? Or isn’t the arms trade relevant, which would exclude 
large numbers of African countries, for instance? If you are luck enough to 
be in the elite of Anglo-American scholars and non-Anglo-American scholars 
living in a country that hasn’t been blown to pieces by the geopolitical 
power and depredations of the oil and ‘defence industries’, or lucky enough 
to live in a country where ‘defence industry’-promoted civil war hasn’t 
destroyed the infrastructure and made the internet an inaccessible dream, 
don’t you have a duty to be taking some kind of action in respect of these 
realities? Will there be many Iraqi scholars taking part in the IEHG, and 
what about asking them?

Favouring the promotion of progressive activities which seek to 
counter-balance the regressive ones is derived from the school of 
“constructive engagement” and “quiet diplomacy” of the mid-1980s, with 
Maggie Thatcher and Old Ronnie at the helm: ‘South Africa will change if 
only we persuade it gently over time’. Suffice it to say that if that had 
been the way South Africa had gone Nelson Mandela might well still be on 
Robben Island and in the interim South Africa would have lost thousands more 
black African lives; but I suppose that would be worth it to us because, 
well, they might *eventually* have gotten what they wanted anyway and we 
could all have carried on making a fortune without any inconvenience to 
ourselves – sorted!

Which brings us by a circular route to Oscar Schindler; what an arrogant 
self-server he was, then! He should have realised that saving a few hundred 
Jews wasn’t going to stop the Holocaust and that it was therefore a 
meaningless and self-serving gesture, if he couldn’t personally guarantee to 
save the entire 6 million and stop the Holocaust… a gradual process of 
constructive engagement with the Nazis would have been far more productive. 
And of course profitable.


Jon Cloke
Newcastle University